The Parting on the Left, Is Now Parting on the Right
Is it possible that our concept of a Left/Right political spectrum is all wrong?
I don’t know about you, but I remember back in either junior high or high school that American political views, ideals, and philosophies exist on a straight-line spectrum with liberalism (the “Left”) on one end and conservatism (the “Right”) on the other. The cornerstone difference between these two ends was an openness to change. Liberals, like R.E.M., believe in and are open to change while conservatives are resistant to change and instead believe in tradition. As an ideological teenager, this made perfect sense. Hell, change was practically the entire theme of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, and that election had a big impact on me. As someone who believed in change, was concerned about the environment, and completely identified with the liner notes of Nirvana’s Incesticide,
At this point I have a request for our fans. If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us -- leave us the fuck alone! Don't come to our shows and don't buy our records.
and Michael Stipe’s collection of t-shirts from the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards.
Obviously, I was a liberal. Duh.
For years I followed politics pretty closely, listening to AM talk radio and NPR on a daily basis, getting into discussions/arguments at work, and, after the 2004 presidential election, I started a blog. For a time there in the mid-to-late aughts, blogging was a thing. There was even a small but active Oklahoma blogging community if you can believe it.
All the while, I believed in that same left/right spectrum I learned about in school. That was until my friend Josh showed me a better way of framing politics, but more on that later.
Recently, I found a video on YouTube titled “The political spectrum is a myth” on the channel The Market Exit.
As one can probably deduce from the title, Andres Acevedo (the man behind the channel) argued that the political spectrum that we’d been taught was a big load of crap. In the video, he referenced the book The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America by Hyrum Lewis and Verlan Lewis. In the book (which I am currently reading), the authors discuss the history behind the essentialist theory of politics, the name given to the left/right political spectrum, and explain how and why it is wrong. Instead, they back the idea of the social theory of politics, which basically says politics is tribal and not ideological.
I’m not done with the book yet, but so far there is a lot about it that I agree with and some I don’t. While it is 100% obvious and accurate to say that modern politics is more about tribes than ideas, I’m not convinced in completely throwing out the idea of a political spectrum. Just because the essentialist theory’s left/right spectrum is lacking, doesn’t mean something else wouldn’t work.
Enter my friend Josh.
We were working at the same call center when he showed me a better way to visualize and describe political beliefs. First, he drew a graph with a crossed x and y axis, with the words Liberals and Conservatives on each end of the horizontal line and Authoritarians and Libertarians on the ends of the vertical line.
Here’s how this works. When you strip everything down to its absolute basics, these ideologies believe the following about what the government should and shouldn’t be able to control.
Liberals believe the government should be able to tell you what to do with your money but not your morals.
Conservatives believe the government should be able to tell you what to do with your morals but not your money.
Authoritarians believe the government should be able to tell you what to do with your morals, money, and everything in between.
Libertarians believe that the government should not be able to tell you what to do with your money, morals, or anything else for that matter.
I fall into the Liberal-Libertarian quadrant which essentially means that, for the most part, I believe that the government should —
leave people alone,
provide protections and a safety net to help people from getting screwed over, and
create an environment of equal opportunity for all.
The Pew Research Center's Political Typology Quiz has a similar configuration that puts me in their Left-Libertarian quadrant.
I’m not the sharpest crayon in the box, but this makes a lot of sense to me and certainly does a better job than what we’ve been using. Politics is an ever-changing and evolving beast and trying to cram all of that into a single-line spectrum, IMHO, just doesn’t work. There are too many contradictions and too much nuance in the real world to ever fit into a straight line.
Besides, how can the Left/Right spectrum ever account for all of the ideological changes that our political parties have gone through over the last 250 years or our tribal behaviors?
Ultimately, it is obvious that The Who were right all along.